


Last of the Tricolour Boys (or, French Boys: IN SPACE)

by Villainyandgoodcheekbones



Series: Corinthian Class  I [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Firefly AU, Gen, I REGRET NOTHING
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 13:44:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Villainyandgoodcheekbones/pseuds/Villainyandgoodcheekbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I could do homework.</p><p>I could. I probably should.</p><p>Or,  I could write 1500 words of a Les Mis/Firefly AU.</p><p>Speaks for itself, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last of the Tricolour Boys (or, French Boys: IN SPACE)

He’ll never forget that night.

It’s June 5th, (although now it’s late, or rather, early enough now that it’s really the 6th ) and they are the Rosettes, the Tricolour Boys, and they are the last ones left. They are the last ones, on the last barricade, and the Alliance is coming, but it doesn’t matter. It’s alright, because help’s coming too, and he sees Enjolras’s face transfigured, lighting up as he sees the ships overhead.

They fly past.

Nobody’s coming.

When he’s feeling melancholy, (which he tries not to, he does, but summer comes and it’s hard, so hard) Combeferre still thinks of it as the night that Enjolras died. Not _died_ , just…died. He has no words for that night, even now.

But Enjolras believes in things, and Combeferre won’t give up the dream, they may be the last of the Rosettes, the Tricolour Boys, but that’s what they are still, even if the Revolution lost. Even if the barricades fell, and nobody came. Enjolras won’t stop fighting, and neither will he. So they scrape together enough to buy a ship. She’s a bucket of rust, and she’ll barely break orbit, but she does, and if you need a job run, a job that you might not want the Alliance to know about, Enjolras will be there, and Combeferre will be with him. They’ll get it done. It’s just the two of them for a while, smuggling guns or food or refugees out to the Rim Planets and back again, fighting back in the only way they still can. Enjolras is captain, and Combeferre navigates. There’s a mechanic who came with the ship, but he hardly counts.

Eventually, they’ve made name for themselves, and things have gotten big enough and dangerous enough that they need help, which is how they pick up Bahorel. Bahorel is everything you’d ever want out of a hired gun; he wears his coarse black stubble like a badge of honour, dresses badly,  and swears fluently in Rim dialects that hardly anybody still speaks. He’s been thrown out of a bar on all eighteen of the major traffic planets, and several more of the less well known ones, owns weapons that are banned under every known arms treaty, and in spite of all this, is a profoundly good man. He’s what you expect when you take on a man as extra muscle.

His partner is not. Jean (call me Jehan) Prouvaire’s taste in clothes is even worse than Bahorel’s. He has guileless hazel eyes and a feathery blonde braid and looks like he might break in half if you shook his hand too hard. Jehan reads Old Earth poetry, Jehan writes his own, and the sight of Jean (call me Jehan) Prouvaire with a gun may just be the single-most terrifying thing Combeferre has ever seen. Jehan laughs like a bell and  Jehan loves woman and children and flowers and has a bounty on his head that could buy a small country. There’s a sprig of Queen Anne’s Lace engraved on the grip of his pistol.

They find Feuilly on Digne IX, when the accelerator jams with a sickening grind, which sends their mechanic on a desperate quest for whatever scrap he can get his grimy hands on to patch it together. Feuilly looks up at them from the hangar bay on the left, where he’s elbow-deep in the rotor blades of an old fan-ship, the planet-bound kind that still fly on whatever arrangement of propellers is in fashion, and says “Your man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

And Enjolras looks down and says “Can you fix it?”

Feuilly’s hands are covered in luminescent paint and he wears a white eagle pinned to a workman’s cap that entirely fails to contain a riot of dense curls on the left, or hide the Resistance  emblem shaved into his scalp in the right. He fixes it. Enjolras, watch in hand, gives the old mechanic one minute to explain why he should be allowed to stay, a week’s pay, and a solemn warning that if he _ever_ thinks to inform on them, Enjolras will hunt him down.

Bousset…

Bousset was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and didn’t mean to be onboard at all. Combeferre bans him from the bridge after he manages to lock all the navigations and nearly crashes them into a salvage crew. But he’s allowed to stay because Joly was on that ship, and Combeferre hadn’t seen him since they graduated together, and for once, they aren’t the last of the Tricolour Boys after all. Joly keeps the med bay absolutely pristine, and, as it happens, knows Bousset as well. They’re almost never seen apart from then on, even visit the same girl whenever they make port.

Nobody’s entirely sure where COURFEYR.ac came from, since the _Musain_ is a Corinthian Class I, and it’s not actually supposed to have a central AI at all. He just…appears one day, the ghost of a bright-eyed man with a crooked grin inside the machine.  He takes over the comm system to talk (or rather, he _is_ the comm system, since he’s almost always talking) or flirt with passengers, who have no idea that the man they’re listening to exists only as a string of code.  Assuming that’s the truth, of course. Combeferre still isn’t sure. They don’t even know what, if anything, extension “.ac” does. Jehan, the romantic, proposes that the “cour” means he’s the heart of the ship.  COURFEYR.ac is fond of Jehan.

COURFEYR.ac also has an alarming number of _ideas_ for an AI. It is, for example, COURFEYR.ac’s idea that they take on a Companion.

“It’ll make us look more legitimate” he says. “It’ll help our cover. We’ll be able to get access to more places, help more people” He also says, at length, that just because he has no body, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have _needs_ and that’s a conversation that nobody wants to repeat ever again.

Grantaire has exquisite blue eyes, and is in fact the single worst Companion in the history of the profession. To be fair, that’s the only reason they can afford his commission, but he seems entirely wrong for the calling. Grantaire is good-humoured, but he’s also caustic and cynical and drunk more often than not. He has black curls like spilled ink and is prone to spectacular fights with the Captain. The one time that Combeferre managed to spot him with a client, he was wrapped in a red silk robe that he’d stolen from Jehan, (and Jehan was much smaller; it looked almost _obscenely_ tight) and he dazzled, charming and sparkling and witty. It was so disconcerting that finding him sprawled halfway across the table in the mess the next morning, red-eyed, hung over and mocking, was a profound relief.

They are a rag-tag, motley crew, but they _fit_.

Still, it makes for…interesting times. The Pontmercy incident will live in his memory forever. The time that they were smuggling, of all things, livestock, and Jehan refused to let go of one of the goats comes in a close second. There was that time at New Waterloo…

So really, he shouldn’t be as surprised as he is when a crash sends him running from the bridge. He really shouldn’t be surprised to find that Valjean (stately and elderly and wanting no-quesitons-asked passage out to the Far Rim) has failed to stop his enormous trunk from falling in the wake of the (damn-near-impossible, thank you _very_ much) maneuvering it took to get the _Musain_ past an Alliance blockade unnoticed. And he wouldn’t be, except that trunk’s latch broke in the fall, spilling an unconscious girl out onto the floor, with her  long, blond hair spread in a damp halo around her head.

A low whistle echoes through the hold, and Combeferre rubs his eyes behind his glasses.

“COURFEYR.ac…”

COURFEYR.ac doesn’t have hands to throw up defensively. As a disembodied voice, it really shouldn’t be possible for him to sound as though that’s exactly what he’s done. COURFEYR.ac somehow manages.

“I’m just saying” he drawls. “As far as comatose, luggage-bound women go, she is a particularly fine specimen.” Valjean, failing to find a suitable method of glaring angrily at a voice, settles for turning his thunderous gaze on Combeferre.

And of course, now the rest of them have showed up, piling into the hold, and Enjolras is a noble soul, who will do almost anything for the Cause, but there is a finite list of the wrongs that Enjolras will tolerate, and this…

Well.

This is new, but Combeferre knows Enjolras, and he knows that this is _definitely_ not on the list.

So, because Combeferre is the navigator, and as such, it falls to him to guide the way here (because if Combeferre can’t find a way, there isn’t one) he says “Monsieur.” Combeferre believes in negotiation, and meetings-of-minds, so he sounds only slightly desperate. “Monsieur, please, what’s going on here?”

It’s June 4th.


End file.
